thread: 2006-01-04 : A Dangerous Idea for 2006
On 2006-01-05, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
The thing about roleplaying games as a way of changing those who enjoy them, compared to most other forms of art/entertainment, is that all the participants are actively creating, instead of a tiny fraction doing all the creation and the vast majority passively enjoying. This is most obvious when one person, e.g. J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkein, writes a novel that millions of people read: Let's guesstimate that the ratio of actively creative participants to total participants is 1:10,000,000. Even for a huge movie like the Star Wars or Lord of the Rings series, the "cast of thousands" and their huge tech crew together doing the creative stuff is dwarfed by the global audience of millions: Let's say 1:1,000,000. In even the most disfunctional roleplaying group, where the GM is God, the plot is railroaded, and players just roll dice when they're told, the ratio of active creators to total participants is at worst 1:10. In a good group, with everyone fully engaged (and good mechanics make this easier), the ratio of active creators to participants is 1:1.
100 percent of participants creatively active in an RPG instead of 0.00001 percent for a movie. Think about that.
Now, when you multiply the tiny number of roleplayers by this high creative participation percentage, you probably still get a smaller number than the huge number of movie-goers multiplied by their tiny creative participation percentage. The RPG experience is rare but intense; the movie experience is common but much less intense; both change people who participate, and therefore potentially change society.
Yet after playing all these math games, I'm still much less worried about participants being conditioned to new behaviors against their will in RPGs than in any mass medium of entertainment. Why? Because—the key point again—roleplayers are active participants. Even the most disfunctional obsessive-immersive, GM-worshipping, railroad-travelling roleplaying is still thinking about what he (rarely she) is doing and making choices in a way the average moviegoer is not. And when you're actively and consciously learning-by-doing, instead of passively learning-by-absorption, your free will to pick and choose how you change is much more engaged.
And anyway, the overt content of a game isn't necessarily what it's teaching the players at all. What the panicky mothers of America never figured out is that D&D is terribly ineffective at inculcating the idea "go out and kill stuff for money," but reasonably effective at inculcating the idea "learn this system of interacting numbers (weapon lists, spell lists, levelling-up charts, monster stats) and you'll have more fun and get more done." Likewise, I don't think Dogs in the Vineyard is particularly effective at getting people to ride into town in funny coats and conduct vigilante justice, but it's very effective at getting people to think of making moral judgments as inherently complex, problematic, and ambiguous—but also necessary.
When my daughter's old enough, I'm going to encourage her to play these games. I'm not afraid of what they'll make her against her will. I'm optimistic about what they'll teach her she can do.
